A Historic Challenge
There can be few places in the UK where the importance of designing a shopping scheme to adapt to the surrounding environment is more important than Bath. The West Country city, famous for its Roman baths, abbey and golden-tinged Georgian architecture, is a Unesco World Heritage site and has attracted visitors from Britain and overseas for centuries. Although a tight planning regime has not stopped a handful of architectural horrors on the fringes of the city centre - including some of the buildings being replaced by the SouthGate Bath development - in general, the historic heart of Bath has been preserved intact.
In no way could the 460,000sq ft SouthGate Bath development of retail, leisure, and accommodation space, due to be completed in 2010, be described as a typical shopping centre. Tagged onto the south side of the existing labyrinth of shopping streets and covered walkways and just north of the railway station and the River Avon, the development is intended to create a seamless transition between old and new. With the use of facsimile Georgian façade panels, it blends into the historic centre of Bath, where the Roman baths, abbey and 18th century avenues are just a few minutes walk away. This is not a covered, standalone scheme that sets about to make its own statement. Instead, SouthGate Bath is all about fitting in. Its network of uncovered and pedestrian streets mirror its neighbouring streetscape and separate the six main, individual buildings and the public spaces, which include a large central square designed to hold community, arts and entertainment events.
The £360m retail-led mixed-use development will also create its own quarter of the city: a "vibrant enclave" which stays awake throughout the night, with 24-hour open access, 93 "urban chic" apartments (25% of which are affordable housing for key workers) and over 35,000sq ft of café and restaurant space. As part of the catering mix, there are five open terrace dining units - marketed as The Vaults - beside the railway station.
The developer, Multi Development UK, says SouthGate Bath is not a shopping centre per se, but a much needed major urban regeneration of the southern part of the city. It will include a new £13m bus station and a major £10m upgrade of the Bath Spa railway station: giving it excellent transport links with the city's primary catchment area, which stretches from Trowbridge, Melksham and Chippenham in the east to Bristol in the west. The project also includes a three-level 860-space basement car park dug into the ground to maintain aesthetics. While most of Bath is worth preserving, few tears will be shed over the loss of the buildings knocked down to make way for the development. "It was the less desirable part of town - a rundown 1960s shopping centre, a bus station and a council multi-storey car-park - and an area which was quite dilapidated and an intimidating place to be in after 6pm," says Jon Munce, development manager at Multi Development UK.
The development has already attracted big new names to Bath, such as Debenhams, the 125,000sq ft anchor store, and H&M, which is taking a 21,000sq ft outlet. Also, Boots, already a presence in the city, is relocating to a larger 30,000sq ft unit there. "We want a broad range of retail offers, which complement the existing retail mix," says Munce. Certainly, Bath is not short of a broad selection of stores, as 40% of its shops are independently-owned, adding to the personality of the city centre. In addition, Bath has its fair share of aspirational brands such as Habitat, Waitrose, Monsoon, Gap, Waterstones and Jigsaw, and family favourites such as WH Smith, BHS and Superdrug.
The scheme will allow for the independent and chain mix found in the rest of the city, to be replicated, with retail units varying from 110sq ft to 20,000sq ft in size. Each has been designed to give simple, regular-shaped interior spaces, which can be easily configured to meet a variety of needs. "The overall intent was to try to produce a modern shopping facility in terms of its size and shape of retail units, within the context of a World Heritage site," says Munce.
However, retailers have to choose from a pallet of shop fronts outlined in a design guide approved by the local council. The guide discourages double height glazed shopfronts, opting for curved glass ideally divided up and framed with timber, although hanging signs are allowed. However, retailers can apply for planning permission if they want to do something different, which Roger Wilson of architect Chapman Taylor believes would be no bad thing. "Personally, I think it would, within reason, be appropriate to have a bit of variety, with contemporary and traditional producing an interesting mix," he says.
One thing the architects did not want to do was create a pastiche of neo-classical Bath - a theme park where characters from local author Jane Austen would not look out of place. "When we took the decision in the mid 1990s to go down a Georgian rather than contemporary route, we knew we had to do it properly and to use genuine Georgian proportion and detailing or risk ending up bringing Disneyland to Bath," says Wilson. But the company was fortunate in employing now-retired classicist expert Robert Chitham as one of its directors. Chitham, renowned as a published author on the classical orders and for his work as chief architect at English Heritage, was involved in the design of the elevations from an early stage. It was his efforts that helped ensure that, while taking inspiration from some of its neighbouring buildings, it did not become kitsch. This was done by deriving the proportions from the classical orders of the Georgian era, with a little bit of licence taken for modern practicalities, says Wilson.
Materials used were authentic, with Bath limestone from three different beds accounting for around 50% of building frontage, and the remainder featuring painted render or stucco. The approach should appeal to ABC1s who make up some 60% of the population of Bath, as well as the millions who visit the city each year. It also gives the development the best of the past and future, says Munce. "SouthGate is not an enclosed shopping centre of the past," he says, "but a tribute to modern design and urban planning."